I think I'm using every chat platform that has wide adaption in tech circles. The one trend I'm seeing is that most of us just use the platform random communities insist on us using, we don't use them out of preference. And those communities choose the platforms because of the support they're getting from companies like discord and the amount of work needed to moderate and administer the community under the platform. My point being: community admins are the real consumers of these products, not normal users.
If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. But if I have to run a community, I will chose whatever platform requires the least effort while integrating well into all my administrative and devops workflows.
If I could speculate a bit, I think discord webhooks and bot api has helped it succeed a lot. But things can be improved upon. Making it dead-easy to integrate into github actions, alert/monitoring platforms,etc.. is a huge selling point. It should be easier to use a platform like this to send notifications than with email. And it should have at minimum one "bridge" type integration that is natively supported: for email! It's really mind-blowing to me with M365, how I have to switch between teams and outlook. How come they haven't figured out how to get and respond to emails from within teams? (the reverse is possible but doesn't work well).
>If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between.
I honestly cannot think of something worse. Chat applications are not forums and they generally suck at replacing them.
Not only does this make topics harder to follow and much harder to find to begin with, it also makes the maintainers bother with the same questions again and again, because users can't find their results in search engines.
it sure beats mailing lists. look at LKML. I prefer discord over LKML any day. But some people prefer them over anything else. That's kind of my point, I don't have the time or energy to complain about this, I just want to talk to the right people. No one asked my preference, so in practical terms, it doesn't even matter.
Few people care about going 31 years back, and indexing stuff themselves. Most users are casual users, and want to have their problem solved right now, with as little effort as possible.
Not that power users don't matter! They do, especially at places like LKML, where everyone is expected to be quite tech-savvy. But most users in the world are not nearly as tech-savvy. For them, zero-friction solutions are a clear win. even if not the only accessible way, despite any other shortcomings.
After searching on lore.kernel.org, do you click through individual messages with such insightful subject lines as, "media: camss: Format configuration per hardware version," and, "rcar-vin: feature enhancement and fixes?" or do you read through the nested results, which on a test search related to a recent problem I had, gave me 2.5 MB of text across 74K lines?
Even then, I didn't find exactly what I wanted and would need to browse the kernel source (and will it be mainline or next?) and click through. The frontend for git.kernel.org does not have per-line blame (unless I missed it somewhere) so I have to checkout just to find the commit I want or browse the log until I find the changed line or hope that the expanded log is verbose enough to match my search term.
lkml.org is certainly no better, with no method of searching or grouping related topics.
Or... Do you refer to a third-party search engine doing the heavy lifting of indexing and deciding the relevance of a problem?
As opposed to most chat clients, where you just search and get a preview of all possible matches, and then go to that conversation. Sure, with Discord it involves opening the client and the potential for security mishaps and other problems of modern software (ads, useless features) but it is generally not difficult to search through a half-decent channel.
You get similar ease-of-use and searchability with a git repository with a half-decent frontend plus it makes it significantly easier to track proposals, changes, feature history, etc.
... except when a merge request or issue suddenly has more than 5 participants or a branch is building a new feature, where it then makes sense to take it to a chat where you get an instant notification and tight feedback loop between all participants, rather than rapid-fire updating the bug tracker and its associated merge request comments and the reported issues in a dependency's repo.
Gotta go; a coworker is asking me in the chat to push a fix to nightly.
Do you use any GUIs to see the emails as a tree of replies? I tried using LKML and even subscribed to some FreeBSD mailing lists.
Its absolute trash. I don't know who's talking to who in what topic. Using ">" as a quote without any coloring and having to judge what level of indentation this is. Its horrible.
discord's search functionality has actually been incredibly useful. Many forums are notorious for having awful search. This is somewhat made up for by the fact that they're indexable and you can google search that forum instead.
There's also a wide spectrum between chat sites and forums. Threads-centric tools like Zulip can be amazing for a community like that. Some, like rocket.chat, are even search-indexable
EDIT: it was actually Zulip not rocket.chat that has the option to make channels public to the web
> Many forums are notorious for having awful search
But google/bing/etc index (basically) all of them. Forum search is great for finding exact title matches, and sometimes useful for exact content matches. Google with site: is better for finding conceptual matches. And, if you don’t know what forum you’re looking for, adding “forum” to your search engine term searches all of them.
Discord is not (and likely will never be) indexed by any search engine. The level of discoverability is almost as low as it can possibly be; you can’t find the community by searching general terms, you have to know the community exists, join it (agreeing to both discord’s and the community’s rules), and then search, only with discord’s search itself.
>Many forums are notorious for having awful search. This is somewhat made up for by the fact that they're indexable and you can google search that forum instead.
I think this really depends on the content. Projects that use discord as their primary community support create a significant barrier for users doing preliminary troubleshooting. I have a huge folder of discord servers of projects I took a couple steps into before passing on. Those should have just been internet searches. Once I have an agent doing that research for me, I assume it will have to register with discord servers just to do its job.
Technically, I think you can make a chat application's chats archivable and searchable, but nobody is going to do that. Discord actually does a better job than I expected, but the text is stuck in the app. It would be great if somehow the chats could be archived in text based format online, but then you would need to write a security model to handle the privacy aspect.
I've landed at AnswerOverflow from Google before. It's a bot you can add to your server so that your server's threads get indexed. I haven't added it to a server myself but it seems decent enough. See https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow
I actually despise using forums, so this is a good thing for me. Chat is a lot more casual, like how you might walk up to a colleague in the office for some advice.
My experience with many forums is that most moderators spend too much time making the forum perfect and less time helping me with my problems. My experience with chat is that I post a question and then someone has an answer pretty quickly
pretty much this, you go where they have setup camp. For instance, I have one tech group that uses telegram, the dumbest tool for a tech discussion that you could choose, but there they are, so that's where I checkin now and then.
I dislike discord because it's a clumsy UI. Usually you want to be able to research what you're interested in. Not a great experience on discord.
Discord tip - if ever you need to rewind to the first message, append /0. Used to be a pain to get there, maybe they've fixed it.
If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. But if I have to run a community, I will chose whatever platform requires the least effort while integrating well into all my administrative and devops workflows.
If I could speculate a bit, I think discord webhooks and bot api has helped it succeed a lot. But things can be improved upon. Making it dead-easy to integrate into github actions, alert/monitoring platforms,etc.. is a huge selling point. It should be easier to use a platform like this to send notifications than with email. And it should have at minimum one "bridge" type integration that is natively supported: for email! It's really mind-blowing to me with M365, how I have to switch between teams and outlook. How come they haven't figured out how to get and respond to emails from within teams? (the reverse is possible but doesn't work well).